Fueled by $50 million, team will boldly go where no researchers have gone before

ORLANDO -- If you think you have "the best idea" about how to cure coronary heart disease -- or better yet prevent it -- there is a $50 million check with your name on it.

The money comes as a partnership announced here today at the opening session of the American Heart Association (AHA) meeting signals a newly aggressive research effort by the AHA and a renewed interest in seeking commercial partners to fund that research.

As outlined, the AHA and Google Life Sciences will each contribute $25 million to the research, all of which will be used to fund a single team under a team leader who may or may not be a cardiologist. "Could be a teenager from Wisconsin who has the best idea," said Andy Conrad, CEO of Google Life Sciences.

Conrad and Brown said that person with the best idea has not yet been identified, but task of finding him or her is starting immediately, as the partners solicit proposals. Once the leader is identified, he or she will "assemble a cross-functional team of investigators, and lead all efforts towards further funding new causes and drivers of coronary heart disease." That team will will include not only clinicians and bench researchers but also the elements of a typical tech product team: engineers and designers, and very possibly experts as far flung as "astrophysicists."

Nancy Brown, CEO, of AHA, noted that the AHA is currently only second to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute in funding cardiovascular research and that research funding effort will continue. The Google-AHA research funding will be in addition to that core research funding activity.

The partners will each contribute $25 million to the 5-year grant and the AHA said its share would come from "general operating funds, in addition to AHA existing and future commitments to research."

Both Brown and Conrad repeatedly claimed that the goal of the partnership was "a cure" for heart disease.

Asked about the danger of setting such a lofty goals, Conrad said that Google's approach has always been to set aspirational goals. "We seek a 10x improvement although that is not always fully achievable, but if the goal is only a 10% improvement and you fall short you can end up with only 5%." He used the analogy of the U.S. effort to reach the moon. "You don't have kids saying "I want to be an astronaut to circle somewhere near the moon -- they want to land on the moon."

Robert A. Harrington, MD, chair of the AHA board of directors and chair of the department of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, Calif., said the partnership provided a chance to do "research in different way from the traditional peer-review process ... it is a new way of thinking about how to do science. " Harrington said he expects the new approach to be disruptive, but also could be a catalyst for major advances.

The best comparison, said Joseph Loscalzo, MD, PhD, editor of Circulation and chair of the department of medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston is the Manhattan Project, which was the World War II research program that led to the development to of the atom bomb. For that project, which was led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the federal government taped research scientists from leading universities, as well as scientists employed by industry and moved them to a compound where they and their families lived until the project was completed.

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